Ali Bahrami wash back
Write the first paragraph of your page here. Section heading Write the first section of your page here. Section heading Write the second section of your page here. Wash back EFFECT The notion that testing influences teaching is commonplace in the educational and applied linguistics literature. Many educationalists have written about the power of examinations over what takes place in the classroom. According to Pearson (1988), it is generally accepted that public examinations influence the attitudes, behavior, and motivation of teachers, learners, and parents. This effect is considered to be negative where Vernon (1956: 166) claimed that examinations ‘distort the curriculum’. He felt that teachers tended to ignore subjects and activities which did not contribute directly to passing the exam, and lamented what he considered to be excessive coaching for exams Others, however, see wash back in a more positive way. Morris (1972) considers examinations necessary to ensure that the curriculum is put into effect, Swain (1985) recommends that test developers ‘bias for best’ and ‘work for wash back’. it might happen that a test is considered to be so important that the preparation for it may dominate the whole teaching and learning. If the teaching is poor and inappropriate and the testing is good, that is, the test administered is a valid test, based on the real communicative needs of the students and includes tasks very similar to those that they have to perform in real life, testing will have beneficial wash back . But if the content and the testing techniques are very far from the objectives of the course, if the teaching is good and appropriate, testing is not, there may be a harmful wash back. The term ‘wash back’ is itself a neutral one, and can be related to ‘influence’. If the test is ‘poor’, then the wash back may be felt to be negative. But if the Wash back Hypothesis holds, then good tests should have good effects (as yet undefined) rather than negative effects. The Washback Hypothesis seems to assume that teachers and learners do things they would not necessarily otherwise do because of the test. But this also implies that a ‘poor’ test could conceivably have a ‘good’ effect if it made teachers and learners do ‘good’ things they would not otherwise do The proper relationship between teaching and testing should be that of a partnership, testing should support good teaching, and if it is necessary it should exert a corrective influence on bad teaching. Within teaching systems, individuals need to be given feedback of their achievement, but in some cases teachers’ assessments of their students might not be sufficient, especially if the achievements of groups of learners are to be compared in order to make decisions. That is why tests are necessary, but it is very important that tests should be of good quality. It seems to us to be important to investigate the nature of wash back first, and the conditions under which it operates. Only once we are able to describe what actually happens, will we be in a position to explore what ‘causes’ these effects. And only after we have established causal relationships will we be in a position to explore whether we are justified in relating wash back to a test’s validity. Thus, talk of wash back or systemic validity is at best premature, and at worst ill-conceived. Alternatively, one might wish to consider the possibility of a test, good or bad, having negative effects. The most obvious such effect is anxiety in the learner brought about by having to take a test of whatever nature, and, if not anxiety, then at least concern in teachers, if they believe that some consequence will follow on poor performance by the pupils. The argument would go like this: any learner who is obliged to do something under pressure will perform abnormally and may therefore experience anxiety. Thus pressure produces abnormal performance, the fear of which produces anxiety. In addition, the fear of the consequences of particular performances produces anxiety which will influence those performances. Similarly for teachers, the fear of poor results, and the associated guilt, shame, or embarrassment, might lead to the desire for their pupils to achieve high scores in whatever way seems possible. This might lead to ‘teaching to the test’, with an undesirable ‘narrowing of the curriculum’. The Wash back Hypothesis Considering wash back in testing there are some hypothesis. It is possible to develop different hypotheses, from the most general and vague to the somewhat more refined, which take account of different factors. These are presented as below: (1) A test will influence teaching. This is the Wash back Hypothesis at its most general. However, a second partly different hypothesis follows by implication from this first one, on the assumption that teaching and learning are related, but not identical: (2) A test will influence learning. Since it is possible, at least in principle, to separate the content of teaching from its methodology, then we need to distinguish the influence of a test on the content of the teaching from its influence on the methodology. Thus: (3) A test will influence what teachers teach; and (4) A test will influence how teachers teach; and therefore by extension from (2) above: (5) A test will influence what learners learn; and (6) A test will influence how learners learn.